A Courageous Soul Under the Sea

My main working method has been the development of a painting style I term ‘memory impressionism’. This method involves going walking somewhere, looking at and absorbing the things I see and experience, and then returning home to my studio to try and capture an echo or essence of the place from memory - including any wildlife I may have seen. By this method I can capture essences and echoes of places and the feeling I have about them. I love the ancient landscapes of England and my paintings often reflect the spiritual elements that such landscapes have. Bio As a child, I taught myself to draw and paint by copying pictures from wildlife and horse books on an almost daily basis and the skills I acquired were added to throughout school and art college. However, my first real introduction to life as a working artist began on leaving art college when I discovered that the Brighton art galleries and the local job centre did not, at once, sign me up for a glittering career as an artist. In the job centre, when I informed my consultant that I had a Fine Art degree, the lady laughed sympathetically and then offered me a job as a chambermaid (which I took). In the art galleries I visited, I was told I needed to be an ‘emerging’ or ‘mid-career’ artist in order for them to be interested. I tried to convince them I had, in fact, ‘emerged’ at age 3 but my reasoning failed to impress and so like millions before me I discovered the well-known issue of needing to be ‘a name’ before I was ‘a name’. However, regardless of not winning the Turner prize or being Picasso, I continued to draw and to paint and regularly took part in or organized exhibitions where I sold work or was given commissions. In the 1990s I met an art agent who travelled the area selling animal portrait commissions and I became one of the artists he represented which was excellent experience as it demanded I learn some formal portrait painting techniques. Commissions continued as my main income source until around 2010 when I first began to sell art online. The success I had on this gave me the opportunity to spend more time developing new ideas and techniques and, for the first time in my career, I painted for my own pleasure, eventually developing a distinctive style of my own. I am a self-representing artist as although I am happy to work with galleries and agents occasionally, I prefer to remain in control of my own creativity. Education I have A-levels in art and art history from Erith Tech in 1977-79. Then I took a foundation art course in Chelsea 1979-1980 and then a Fine Art degree in Brighton completing in 1983. I am also a trained adult education art teacher (certificate 730)